Comments on: Getting involved in Gnome is broken

By: Pavel

Pavel — Sat, 31 May 2008 15:20:49 +0000

Andy, you somehow missed the point while defending your beloved C
My point was not that everybody should immediately stop using C, but that the Gnome Projects which are quite high level should stop using C, like they are doing by using Vala.
But I think they should better get it right directly and just use some established Language instead of reinventing the wheel by putting another level of indirection above C.

By: andy-held

andy-held — Sat, 31 May 2008 12:00:37 +0000

I think A. made a good point, besides his crusader like defense of the suppossedly holy-war-less Vala.

C is deeply integrated in almost every system we work on today (as soon as it’s beyond VHDL). If your wish would come true and NOBODY would use C anymore, we’d be in big trouble, I’d say.
I wouldn’t go as far as saying every developer should be able to write perfect C code, but some things have to be done in C.

By: Pavel

Pavel — Sun, 25 May 2008 14:48:06 +0000

you are right in the point that I did not look deep enough into Vala before writing my post – but hey that is the greatness of blogs; the allow comments.

but I think your post was not quite objective. Vala actually requires a runtime it is libgee and most likely glib too, since you wont be able to do anything useful with Vala without using them.

Then efficiency: a language using reference counting for memory management is not quite what I would call efficient. A dedicated garbage collector process can optimise the memory much more. (reduce fragmentation)

By: A. Nonymous

A. Nonymous — Sat, 24 May 2008 21:42:43 +0000

Your post shows that you’ve completely missed the point of Vala, which is not surprising if you’re professing Java/D/C#.

Vala is:
RUNTIMELESS: NO extra software to install to use a program written in Vala. No overhead. No holy-war/my-language/runtime/class-system-is-better. Vala programs don’t even depend on GObject unless you choose for them to.
EFFICIENT: Both in memory and CPU time. NONE of the languages in the current environment can claim this; they’ve all chosen one to work on and damned all other aspects. It’s essentially just a macro assembler on top of C and optionally GLib/GObject. This makes it extremely attractive as a fast way to write C programs (which, as we all know, is lingua franca as far as languages go; if your platform doesn’t have a libc, your platform doesn’t exist, period).
PLATFORM INDEPENDENT: Again, no runtime, no need to run on anyone’s platform. It spits out C. Even the most deeply embedded environments have support for C.

Vala is what Java could have been and C# should have been. Instead, Sun decided to make Java a closed ecosystem, then changed their minds, Microsoft decided to clone Java and kept the worst aspects of it, and the D guys decided they couldn’t make up their minds on features, so they dumped in every possible one they could think of (enough to make a KDE developer blush). Vala is NOT a GNOME-only language; it works just fine on your own created object models, it works just fine sitting atop D-Bus, which makes it extremely attractive for that purpose (as anyone who’s ever written a D-Bus-bound application knows that it’s worse than having to write C applications at times).

And GNOME contributors still only have to learn a few APIs, Vala makes them so much easier.

Troll harder.